Research With A Secondary Focus

Literature and Drama

English and ‘The Arts’

One of the ongoing debates about the nature of English centres around its relationship the creative arts. Is English an Arts based, creative discipline? Or a much more functional, competency led subject? Equally, is its central pre-occupation the study and appreciation of Literature or the development of a critical literacy in which the literary text is one text type amongst many? Is Drama a part of English [as prescribed in the National Curriculum] or absolutely a separate subject. Is Drama itself an Arts based discipline or a method of education, a form of learning? Drama practitioners continue the latter debate although, I would argue, that the pendulum currently has swung well towards the Arts and theatre studies end.

For a number of reasons, Drama needs to be treated as a special case. I agree with Drama specialists that the great majority of English teachers are not trained to be any kind of equivalent to their properly trained Drama colleagues. English teachers need to be able to use some Drama techniques such as role play, tableaux, hot seating, forum theatre and so on. More importantly they need to be able to treat drama texts as drama, Shakespeare, for example, being a particular challenge. The work of Rex Gibson remains a powerful source of inspiration for teachers adopting an active approach to Shakespeare. His work was not ‘research’ in terms of producing data to analyse, but he created a great deal of evidence that his approaches could successfully engage pupils with Shakespeare texts.

Of all the messy debates cited above, the key one centres around literature, its role in the curriculum and then, how it should be taught and assessed. There has not been a significant project, at least in the UK, researching the teaching of literature per se for many years. However, there has been plenty of activity that stems from contrasting theoretical positions.

Reader response

One tradition has been that of reader response with its roots in Rosenblatt’s seminal texts [see, for example, 1978]. This tradition positions the reader as a highly active constructer of the text, bringing life experience and textual knowledge to bear on every reading, so making each reading potentially unique. The almost oppositional tradition comes from I.A. Richards via Leavis and the New Critics which argues that very close reading can lead to unlocking the full meaning of the text. Both Rosenblatt’s and Richards’ positions come from their actual work with students. Both, literally, experimented with their students and texts to produce data to support their views. Since the 1920s and 30s there has been constant theorising about literary reading and huge debates in Higher Education about Marxism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Modernism, Postmodernism and so on. None of which, in my opinion, has had any real impact on secondary English teaching at the classroom level in the UK. To my knowledge, there has not been any empirical work to test out these varying theoretical opinions.

Literature and assessment

However, my own research suggests that the models of English are the most important, but submerged, influences. English teachers espouse the Personal Growth model and you can see it in their teaching, especially in Key Stages 3 and 4. This model sits very comfortably with a reader response pedagogy. However, in KS5, two factors change. One is the direct pressure of the University model of Literature study, focused through ‘A’ level, and the second is the influence of that model on the formative identities of English teachers, the great majority of whom have relatively traditional English Literature [with variations] degrees. My research with trainees over nearly 20 years shows very clearly that their experience at ‘A’ level was highly formative, it is their ‘A’ level teachers they can remember as inspirational [Goodwyn, 2002]. University both deepened this relationship to literature and damaged it.

The most recent research project of significance, English in Urban classrooms [Kress et al. 2005], has some very interesting insights into the teaching of literature, although based on a tiny sample. Its qualitative approach produces some vivid, case study vignettes of urban, multicultural classrooms.

Literature on literature

There are a few texts that I have found very stimulating when thinking about literature in broad terms. Appleyard’s book, [1990] remains an excellent review about the development of readers of fiction and he illuminates his text with case study vignettes of real readers. He offers a developmental model that I have found very robust and especially useful for helping student teachers to reflect on their own reading histories and on the emergent reading identities of their pupils. Jack Thomson developed a rather more complex developmental model that is also very valuable as a means to consider adolescent development. More recently I have appreciated Denis Sumara’s ideas about the experience of literature, especially his aptly named Why reading literature in school still matters: imagination, interpretation, insight [2002]. What strikes me about his approach is that it is antithetical to the current approach of the Framework for English as it requires both an intense engagement with a whole text AND opportunities to re-read and reflect on responses to the text.

Literature – is what exactly?

Perhaps literature is no longer a helpful term when trying to understand the experience of school students? For example, the Australians had a huge debate about genre in the 1990s, some researchers suggesting that genre was the holy grail of textual understanding.

If we go below the umbrella category of literature we can find some much more ‘useful’ research to discuss with trainees. For me, poetry stands out in this respect. Richard Andrews book The Problem with Poetry is not [and did not try to be] a research report but it draws on many years of his action research approach [see Richards, 2004] and it reviews both influential theories and practices in valuable detail. Michael Benton has followed a very interesting theme over nearly 30 years, investigating the status of poetry in secondary schools, analysing its teaching and the responses of students, and, more recently, exploring the interrelationships between still images [typically paintings] and poetic forms and images.

In my view, literature teaching and the responses of readers in school contexts, are very under-researched, especially in what is now the age of capital ‘L’ literacy. Arthur Applebee [1993] undertook a comprehensive and well funded review on literature in US High schools which examined this area in a thorough and definitive way and, to my knowledge, this remains the only study of its kind. We have competing claims about the purpose of including literature in the curriculum and about differing pedagogical approaches. It is not an area, I believe, where research could produce a simplistic formula for all teachers, quite the reverse, such research should be truly investigative.

Andrews, R. (1991) The Problem with Poetry, open University |Press, Milton Keynes.
Applebee, A. (1993) Literature in the secondary school, NCTE, Urbana.
Appleyard, B (1990) Becoming a Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Goodwyn, A. (2002) Breaking up is hard to do: English teachers and that LOVE of reading, English Teaching, Practice and Critique, Vol1, No. 1, 66-78.
Kress, G at al (2005) English in Urban classrooms: a multimodal perspective on teaching and learning, Routledge Falmer, London
Rosenblatt, L. (1978) The reader, the text, the poem; the transactional theory of the literary work, Southern Illinois University press, Carbondale.